Friday, November 13, 2009

TALES FROM THE CRAPPER

Fritz the Cannibal

Fritz Haarmann, a meat dealer in post-First World War Germany, was Europe's most prolific homicidal cannibal. In the 1920s the Vampire of Hanover picked up young male refugees at the local railway station, and lured them back to his Jewish ghetto apartment where he sexually assaulted them and killed them by biting their throats. He then sold their flesh as horse meat in an open market in Hanover, eating what he couldn't sell. He was apprehended in 1924 after some young boys fishing in the river discovered several human skulls. Haarmann was only ever convicted of the murders of twenty-seven young men aged between thirteen and twenty, although police estimated that he probably killed as many as 600 in a single year. He was beheaded in Hanover prison on 15 April 1925.